In 2011, a meta-analysis found that among young people the capacity for empathy (defined as Empathic Concern, “other-oriented feelings of sympathy,” and Perspective-Taking, the ability to “imagine other people’s points of view”) had massively declined since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly associate this with the spread of social media. In the decade since, it’s probably vanished even faster, even though everyone on the internet keeps talking about empathy.

You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject.

Oh god—what have I done? Why did I keep saying things I didn’t actually believe? Why did I keep behaving in ways that were clearly cruel and wrong? And how did I manage to convince myself that all of this was somehow in the service of the good? I was drunk on something. I wasn’t entirely in control.

Maybe these were simply bad people, but I’m not so sure. There’s an incident I think about a lot: back in 2019, a group of bestselling authors in their 40s and 50s decided to attack a young college student online for the crime of not liking their books. Apparently wanting to read anything other than YA fiction means that you’re an agent of the patriarchy. The student was, of course, a woman. So what? Punish her! For a while they whipped up thousands of people in sadistic outrage. Even her university joined in. But then, the tide suddenly shifted, and one by one they were forced to apologize. ‘I absolutely messed up. I will definitely do better and be more mindful moving forward. I made a mistake.’ Of course, these apologies weren’t enough. The discourse was unanimous: we want you to grovel more; we want to see you suffer. Was absolutely everyone involved making the same personal moral lapse? Or could it be that they’d all plugged their consciousnesses into a planet-sized sigil that summons demons?

With every texting relationship, every group chat, every email chain, every book we read, every series we binge, every link we click—we place our fragile attention in the hands of someone else. It is an act of trust, and we benefit from taking that act seriously.

P.G. Wodehouse

Nietzsche gives us the courage to resist the tyranny of the new,

the books we have dog-eared into submission

cud

What does not kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting.

We may want, that is, the information equivalent of fast food.

The unfortunate truth is that fast reading and fast writing don’t make people more flexible, more capable of slow reading and writing when the situation demands them.

If “slow reading” is so liberating, why has every lit major with a Twitter feed written a thread about how they once loved big Russian novels such as Anna Karenina but now struggle to make it through lifestyle articles in the newspaper?

A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much of my book, are friends of lento [slowness].

“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said. It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was. “I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”

Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America.

It may seem like there is more fringe thinking now because it is unfolding on your laptop screen, whereas previously it was easy to overlook the scribbled notebooks in your cousin’s neighbor’s basement that were thrown out when he passed away.

Yet in the past decade, Flat Earth theory has achieved a certain currency, fueled by YouTube videos and an appetite for contrarian thinking, hyperskepticism, and a yearning for community.

Meanwhile, popular and scientific periodicals alike have been bursting with incidents of scientific fraud or misconduct (in some cases alleged, in others confirmed): Jan-Hendrik Schön’s organic semiconductors at Bell Labs (2002), Victor Ninov’s reported discovery of elements 116 and 118 at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (2002), Hwang Woo-Suk’s claim to have cloned human embryonic stem cells (2005), Marc Hauser’s evolutionary psychology announcing advanced cognition in rather unprepossessing cotton-top tamarins (2010), among others. [2] Alongside these egregious forms of academic misconduct, there have been a host of others, such as plagiarism, gaming the metrics that get scientists promoted through fraudulent citations and affiliations, and laundering cooked industry numbers through ghostwriting. [3]

Bookshelves are buckling under the weight of history books about the oddities of science. In 2010, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway published Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury), which traced the careers of a small group of scientists who were instrumental in spreading theories that denied tobacco smoke’s negative impact on human health, or acid rain’s on the environment, or anthropogenic climate change’s on absolutely everything. (A movie adaptation has since appeared.) The following year, Norton released MIT historian David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics, which followed countercultural physics graduate students in the 1970s who explored, among other quantum questions, the theory of faster-than-light travel and the practice of hallucinogenic drugs. In 2012, yet another historian of science, W. Patrick McCray, published The Visioneers (Princeton University Press), a detailed analysis of space colony and nanotechnology enthusiasts (and the occasional pornographer) in the ’70s and ’80s, after which nanotechnology alone escaped the badlands and was embraced as a staple of materials science. These are not fringe scholars nor are their books marginal: each was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society, for “books in the history of science directed to a wide public,” in 2011, 2013, and 2014 respectively.

Perhaps the super rich still do aristocratic tutoring, in secret? It turns out these are mostly, again, interventions, even if we look at the most expensive tutor:. . . the tutor he placed for $400,000 a year was for a rich family on the West Coast. The student was having trouble with school and with substance abuse, so the tutor had to home-school the student and coach the student and his family through rehab.

3Even Hannah Arendt’s lovers acted as aristocratic tutors. While still a young college student Arendt had an affair with her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, which she (perhaps perversely) described as “the blessing of my life.” Apparently:Arendt was to Heidegger a young, beautiful woman who could follow the complicated paths of his thought; he was to her an initiation into existential philosophy and the life of the mind.

Not everything gets better with time. There are a number of things that people did better in the past, both because of lost wisdom but also simply because in the past things weren’t mass-produced. Beautiful older dresses, hand-stitched rugs, even kitchen appliances used to be sturdier and last longer. You can go purchase a mass-produced cheap samurai sword online, but you’d be a fool to use it in a fight against a blade of 20-times folded steel, even if the latter were ancient. Stradivari violins, hand-crafted by members of the Italian Stradivari family, are legendarily considered to have a superior and unique sound compared to violins made with even the most modern techniques.A child going from governesses teaching them multiple languages to renowned scholars tutoring them in advanced mathematics is similarly not replicable in today’s world. In turning education into a system of mass production we created a superbly democratic system that made the majority of people, and the world as a whole, much better off. It was the right decision. But we lost the most elegant and beautiful minds, those mental Stradivari, who were created via an artisanal process.

And they 3 became pregnant, and they bare great giants,

men had multiplied that in those days were born unto 2 them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men 3 and beget us children.'

But for the elect there shall be light and joy and peace, b And they shall inherit the earth.

And you seek shade and shelter by reason of the heat of the sun, and the earth also burns with growing heat, and so you cannot tread on the earth, or on a rock by reason of its heat.

KYC registration

Part of the reason is that work feels like an extension of something we’ve been doing our whole lives. Figure skating isn’t like school, but showing up at work seems to be. “I’ve got this,” is a badge of honor.

McLuhan’s ultimate fears come true!

Is there a standard universal identity layer, or do different ecosystems have different logins? Can it exist on top of current internet architecture, or must we develop a more native support of many-to-many connections? Could the actual compute itself happen on decentralized networks over the long term? How do modern organizational structures translate into it, if at all? What degree of anonymity is permissible and for which functions? Who decides?

Measuring Human Experience is critical to the sustained growth of a business.

That’s why Adoreboard’s mission is to unite these experiences by measuring what matters most in any experience: human emotion.

CSAT

NPS

We build relationships that matter.

Ethnographies

Diverting the most capable women away from reproduction is dysgenic

He is your natural slave.

The results of research tasks feed forward to subsequent tasks that cannot be executed until questions raised pre-research have been answered.

This includes not only the questions that drove the research and the answers you developed, but also the methods by which the research was done and the sources where the information was found.

1935: Oral sex. 2013: Oral sex, regular sex, not being afraid of over-texting him anymore, looking his ex-girlfriend up on Facebook (she’s pretty!), looking at his ex-girlfriend’s Twitter and finding that her most recent tweet was "haha croissants lol" (she’s boring!), telling your mom you kind of met someone but "he's probably a freak or a loser or something," hooking up without both of you having drank for the first time, realizing your cat actually likes him more than she likes you and not having a problem with that.

As for the old oligarchy, the cathedral and civil service—they were simply liquidated—rounded up, shot, dumped in a ditch, soaked with gas and burned… No! What am I saying? That was a totally different timeline. Bad dream. Sorry. That would be a major bummer. Please definitely don’t do that.

Therefore, these rational peasants used the power of democracy—which is irresistible but unstable—to depose their old oligarchy and install a new monarchy.

First: their government sucked. Both the cathedral and the civil service were insanely obsessed with race—because

First: their government sucked. The Tsar was creepy, incompetent and sadistic. His son, the Tsarevich, was a junkie, a rumored pedophile and a known hemophiliac.

chanterelle

basal

Go back to the lake and the sewage. How do you fix the lake? Not by skimming off the algae! Obviously, you need to stop the sewage leak and get rid of the pig farm. Then, you can either wait for the lake to purify itself naturally, or pump the polluted water out and let the clear blue mountain stream refill the basin. I recommend… the latter.

When we remove pseudo-information that has obviously evolved in this way, we are not left with the opposite of the pseudo-information, but an absence of information. Whatever the signal reality is sending us, we cannot hear it. All we know is that our institutions cannot hear, think, learn, know, understand or teach any recessive ideas—that is, ideas that would damage or delegitimate the powers that be.

The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.

funky encrypted Internet stuff

bad ideas in the humanities have in some way flourished at Yale (and everywhere else)—like toxic green algae in a once-blue mountain lake. Now why would that happen?

Math is perfectly suited to the cathedral—and the Soviet Union. In fact, it is hard to imagine any form of government so dysfunctional and dystopian that it could not, given the raw autistic IQ talent, make progress in math.

inexorable forces: physical reality and human ignorance. The latter relaxes its grip only by painfully-won millimeters.

“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.

magna est veritas et praevalebit: the truth is great, and will prevail. Somehow.

An optimal disinformation weapon works by convincing its enemy than an ineffective strategy is effective

It may not be the meek who inherit the earth. It is always the humble.

Problems, though, began when I beganTo think, like some rogue algorithm,

What troubled us most was this disparityBetween the books of ourselves and the thingsWe saw our body do.

been our twenties,

they want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist.

If the diffusion of education, Having the general tendency to elevate the understanding, is to produce more had men than good, we had better abandon than foster our Common School system.

demagogues

ARISTIDES

regicides

the value of someone's coin should be correlated to that person's standing in society.

philomath

For Pogany, the world of seventeenth-eighteenth century is a stable, proto-global merchant system that collapses with the French revolution. Around 1815, after 20 years of chaos and Napoleonic wars, the next stabilized system is Smithian capitalism marked by a total domination of capital over labour. Smithian capitalism collapses in WW1, which creates another chaotic period ending after WW2, with the emergence of the social democratic welfare state, which collapses in 2008.

planetary guilds enabled by blockchains.

ZapatistasF

nation, and the state

The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0

I think this is what happens to humanity: we extend as systems and weaken as individuals.

the irrationality of rationality.

At the moment, we are divested of our data all the way down to our desires and nervous systems.

At the same time, there are many issues that remain global. How do you deal with overfishing in international waters? You need a global institution for that. How do you deal with Fukushima-like accidentsFootnote 14? The radioactive wave does not stop at your border.

‘Wave Pulse theories are cyclical theories of human history, which see societies evolving in a succession between more extractive/degradative phases, and more regenerative phases in which the commons operate as a key “healing” mechanism.’Footnote 13 During the degradative phases of consumptive expansion, the ruling class pushes towards the use of more and more resources – they have to do this, because they are competing with others. When things start degrading (soil becomes depleted, or whatever else happens in a particular context), that degradation creates a counterreaction and opens up a regenerative phase needed for saving the region where it occurs. But as soon as the regenerative phase is over, humankind begins a new degradative phase.

TechnoCalyps

our intelligence—also makes us uniquely vulnerable to mental predators and parasites.

“Memes inside a memeplex survive better as part of the group… they form a self-organizing, self-protecting structure that welcomes and protects other memes that are compatible with the group, and repels memes that are not.”

The Meme Machine

“Self-justification means that the components of a memeplex mutually justify each other.”

A meme only needs to fake positive qualities to be repeated, even if it’s actually useless, meaningless, unhealthy, or a straight-up lie.  

I like to feel powerful.

Jane Fonda

symps

symps

There is nothing we find more despicable than spontaneous collective action motivated by collective self-interest among a homogeneous consensus.

You are right that you have a fatal disease. It is one your body recognizes as self.

Video et taceo

Vogon spy

“I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”